Mr. Wymett had another drink—“just one more”—to the success of The Guardian under its new management, and became expansive for once in his cautious life.
“You’ve bought into a sporting proposition, young man.” The retiring editor rested his lined and puckered face on his hand, and regarded his vis-à-vis thoughtfully. “A sporting proposition. Oh, God; I’m glad to be out of it—and sorry! It’s a hell of a life, and I ‘ve loved it. But in the end it gets you. Like a drug.”
He sat staring in a brief silence at the young, sanguine, keen face before him; a sad, humorous-eyed, ageing, slovenly, dishonest, tolerant philosopher.
“You’re young,” he broke forth. “Young enough, probably, to believe that you can run a newspaper and still be—and still keep your ideals. Oh, I had ’em, when I started in, just as you’ve got ’em. Of course you’ve got ’em! They go with youth. Perhaps they’d stay with youth if youth would stay with us. But you grow old so damnably fast in this game. Look at me! Or perhaps you’d better not look at me. You might see yourself as you’ll be at my age.”
“Not me,” returned Jeremy Robson with unflattering conviction.
“Not? Well, perhaps not. I ‘m an old babbler. So you want Fenchester to know that it’s your own money that’s behind the paper?”
“Yes; so they’ll understand that it’s a strictly one-man proposition.”
“And you think it’s going to be. Oh, well; for a little while, maybe. Then—” His voice was as that of one who regretfully deprives a child of a sweetmeat—“you’ll forego that happy and infantile dream. You’re not going to run your newspaper just because you’ve bought it. The politicians are going to run it for you. The banks are going to run it for you. The railroads and trolley lines and water-power companies and public-utility people are going to run it for you. And always the advertisers—the advertisers—the advertisers. You ’re going to be just a little, careful, polite Recording Secretary for them all. You ’ll print what they tell you to and you ’ll kill what they forbid you to print. Otherwise you can’t live. Don’t I know! I’ve tried it—both ways.”
He dreamed with somnolent eyes back over the happy, troubled, iniquitous, exciting years of The Guardian. “And so you think you’ll change all that! Not much to be left of the old Guardian, eh? Perhaps not even his figurehead, blowing his trumpet over the paper’s title. I hope you’ll leave that, though. It’s been there a long time. Fifty-odd years. Almost as long as I’ve lived. For old times’ sake I’d like to see him stay, the old Guardian. We newspaper men are all sentimentalists and conservatives at heart.”
“Not me,” denied Jeremy. “Not the conservative part, anyway. But I ‘ll leave The Guardian his trumpet.”